Tory Johnson: Dusting Your Digital Dirt

ByABC News via logo
March 15, 2006, 5:08 PM

March 16, 2006 — -- Do you or your kids have digital dirt? If so, it might be time to start sweeping it up.

Digital dirt is the information about you -- your hobbies, your photos, your rants and raves -- that's available on the Internet through personal Web sites, profiles on popular social-networking sites, and comments on blogs. What you -- and certainly your teenagers -- might not realize is that employers are reading what's out there and in many cases these things can derail your job prospects even before you're called for an interview.

This all started with Google. The popular search engine enabled all of us to become private eyes -- we can look up anyone and anything on the Internet with the simple click of the mouse. This is a great tool for job-seekers. They can Google an interviewer to learn something about that person in hopes of using it to establish a rapport during the interview.

But there's a flip side: those same employers check out prospective hires. With basic online searches, they're finding risqué photos posted on personal Web sites and social networks. They're reading brags about excessive drinking and promiscuity, and plenty more

With the high costs of recruiting, training and retaining top talent -- from entry level to senior executives -- employers must be cautious about who they hire. As a recruiter, if I'm considering two college seniors for the same position and I come across an online profile for one of them that brags about rowdy parties and drunken escapades, I might think twice about that person. And I will likely lean more toward the candidate who has a clean online profile -- or none at all.

Why would anyone want the contents of a silly social site to be held against him when looking for a job? The safest, smartest option is to clean up online profiles. Instead of ordering your teens to remove their profiles, which won't likely go over too well with them, you can encourage them to have fun expressing themselves --